


Hellfire Roy vs. The Homunculus Lust

by Atlas_M_33



Series: The Fullmetal Mechanisms [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Immortality, Immortals in Space, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Pre-Relationship, Temporary Character Death, The Mechanisms AU that no one asked for, The Mechanisms-Typical Violence, as in it wasn't discussed before it happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:40:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27068776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atlas_M_33/pseuds/Atlas_M_33
Summary: Roy Mustang is a living weapon drafted into the war against the enemy forces trying to take over the moon, and he's just trying to make it through alive.He's not very good at that part.OR:Five times Edward Elric saves Roy's life, and some things that happened after that.
Relationships: Edward Elric & Maes Hughes, Edward Elric & Roy Mustang, Gracia Hughes/Maes Hughes, Maes Hughes & Roy Mustang
Series: The Fullmetal Mechanisms [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2092710
Comments: 4
Kudos: 43





	Hellfire Roy vs. The Homunculus Lust

**Author's Note:**

> I have no excuses. I wrote this for an audience of Me and y'all're just gonna have to deal with it now. Canon typical violence and gore applies to both fandoms.
> 
> If you’re reading this and you’ve never heard of The Mechanisms please take a few minutes out of your day to listen to "Gunpowder Tim vs. the Moon Kaiser" to see what this fic was based on
> 
> This started with me going "hehe Roy and GPT both = eye trauma + make things go boom" and then spiraled out of control from there.

The first time Edward Elric saves Roy’s life, pretty much the only thought in his head is that either he’s already dead, or he’s about to be.

“Yo.” An angel just dropped into the ditch he and Maes have been pinned in for the last 18 hours, and it’s looking at them like they’re the ones out of place. “You guys doing okay?”

They are, most definitely, not doing okay. They’ve been trapped for most of the day, unable to move out from under their lead-lined sanctuary for fear of the microwave beam that sweeps over this section of the tunnels in random intervals. (It won’t occur to Roy until much, much later, but the fact that Ed dropped into their hole only about three minutes after the most recent beam had passed should’ve been Roy’s first sign that something was weird.)

As it is, he’s just glad to see another person.

He keeps staring, because he’s dehydrated and his legs are cramping and his head's pounding like Armstrong’s banging away in there, and even without those circumstances in place he’d need a minute to gather his thoughts with someone that pretty looking at him. “Umm-”

“Not really.” Maes replies, because he’s the best and also because he’s looking at one of the pictures of Gracia and Elysia that he keeps in his jacket and not the being that’s about to pull their souls from their bodies and cart them off to wherever they go.

“Hmm.” The angel replies, before flopping down to join them in the dust. “That’s fair I guess.”

Maes, who currently has custody of the only functional brain cell Roy Mustang ever possessed, puts his photo down for long enough to reach across their pit and offer his hand. “Maes Hughes.”

“Ed Elric.” They shake, and the angel turns to Roy, raising an expectant eyebrow. His eyes glow gold as they reflect the dull red warning lights that never seem to turn all the way off.

“Roy. Roy Mustang.” The angel’s, _Ed’s,_ eyes go wide for a moment before a grin slices across his face. 

“Mustang, like, the _Flame Alchemist_ Mustang?”

Roy blinks, but before he can take advantage of being recognized to score some points with the loveliest man he’s ever seen Maes is tossing an arm around his shoulder and dragging him in close, digging his knuckles into Roy’s hair. “Yep! This is him!” He manages to fight his best friend off, but not before taking some serious hits to his dignity.

It’s hard to tell, with how dim the light is, but it almost looks like Ed’s laughing. 

He leans in, squinting at the backs of Roy’s gloves. Roy moves one of his hands from his lap, holding it out so Ed can get a better look, and doesn’t regret it when it ends up cradles between Ed’s. 

Ed hums, tilting his head to the side. “Your array is decent right now, but if you moved your oxygen and grounded your circle here instead of here you’d have tighter control.” He taps the spots he means, and Roy is-

Well, shocked is one word for it. 

_“How did I not think of that!_ ” Maes is smothering a laugh, and Ed looks smug.

He tucks a lock of blond hair back under his hood, a single strand of gold that flashes in the dim light before it disappears, and smiles. “You were too focused on the boom.” 

Maes breaks, a full on cackle ripping its way out of his chest.

Then the warning lights flare and all three of them duck as the beam of heat sweeps over their heads, barely held off by the thin layer of lead Roy managed to wrap them in when they first got separated from the rest of the men. It passes, and Ed sticks his head up just far enough to look over the lip of the hole they’re tucked in.

“Well. Later!” Ed vaults out of the hole, Maes scrambles to call him back, Roy takes a moment to mourn, and not even an hour later they watch as the microwave tower comes crashing down, causing enough of a ruckus for the other side that the two of them can make the mad dash across no man’s land straight into the arms of their own people.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever see Ed Elric again, but those five minutes were worth it, even if only for the way Roy’s precision shots get even tighter once he’s made the adjustments to his array that Ed suggested.

The second time it happens, he has to take a moment to accept that he didn’t imagine their entire first encounter and that Ed _does_ look just as young as Roy remembers. There’s a moment where he thinks it’s just a little too obvious how desperate the top brass must be getting, if they’re accepting 18 year old kids into the combat alchemist program and sending them up here to die in their war, but then Ed claps his hands together sets off a transmutation so devastating that Kimblee, standing off to the side, whistles. Ed, who’s dusting off his hands like he didn’t just pull off a circleless transmutation and save the lives of a bunch of military alchemists that know just how impossible that is, just rolls his eyes and flips Kimblee the bird. 

Roy knew he liked him for a reason, even if he was convinced Ed had been a stress fueled hallucination until about five minutes ago.

He gives a little wave when Ed passes, and the blond shifts his route, heads for Roy instead. “Get me out of here before I do something drastic in the name of never seeing that asshat again.” 

Roy doesn’t bother to smother his laugh as he gestures for Ed to follow him back to base and the ditch he left Maes in when the alarms started going off. They slump in a few minutes later to find him gleefully tearing into a care package. 

“Ed! Look at these pictures my darling Gracia sent of our little angel!” Said photos get shoved in his face so quickly that Ed takes a step back to avoid getting hit and _still_ has to go cross eyed to see them.

He leans back, actually takes a second to look at them, and something in his face goes soft. “She’s adorable. I bet you can’t wait to get back to her.”

“You have no idea.” Maes must see something change in Ed’s face because his eyebrow hikes up the way it does when something’s actually caught his attention. “Or maybe you do. You got someone?” 

Ed’s entire face lights up. “A little brother, smartest damn kid in the whole world. Photo got lost a few weeks back though.”

From the look on Maes’ face you’d think Ed had just systematically insulted his entire family tree. “You only had one photo?”

Before Ed can dignify that with a response a young man in a runner’s uniform sticks his head into their nook. “Elric! You’ve got a debrief in ten!”

“Fuck off.” The runner blinks, shrugs, and takes off, so he must either know Ed or have gotten a warning from the person who sent him. Roy laughs, and his best friend finally wins his fight with the tie on a package of cookies. 

Ed just huffs out a bone rattling sigh and sags against the wall, looking like he’d like nothing more than to sink into the floor and become one with it. “How do they keep finding me?” 

Roy, about two seconds from making a comment about how Ed’s height was definitely _not_ a contributing factor, is saved from his own stupidity when Maes shrugs and offers Ed the bag. “It’s your hair.”

Ed, halfway through the religious experience of eating one of Gracia’s cookies for the first time, nearly chokes. “What!?”

Maes nods. “It’s not exactly the most common color up here. Once the flashes pick up you’re easy to spot.” Roy nods his agreement.

He’s genuinely impressed that Ed’s managed to last this long, he would’ve thought that his hair, gold as anything and hanging in a long, definitely _not_ regulation braid down his back, would’ve gotten him shot by now, given the way it shines every time an explosion or fire lights up the tunnels. “Might want to consider bringing the hood back.”

Ed waves a hand at him lazily. “Eh, whatever. I’ll be fine.”

Roy looks up and sees Maes staring right back at him, and he knows they’re both thinking the exact same thing.

The third time Roy’s a little too busy bleeding out to think anything past _Oh shit, Ed might actually be an angel_ before the lights are going out in his brain.

He wakes up in one of the foxholes that’s been converted into a makeshift med den with his leg expertly bandaged and Maes telling him that Elric had carried him in on his shoulders, dropped him in a bed, and then taken off again without so much as a word.

“It was so heroic,” Maes says, leaning in and fluttering his eyelashes because he’s an asshole. “Very dashing.” He mimes wiping a tear from his cheek.

Roy shoves him back with a hand splayed across his face and does his best not to blush at the hazy memory of Ed’s face when Roy started muttering about angels.

The fourth time, he rolls into a trench just in time to see Ed lunge forward and take a bullet to the shoulder that was destined for Roy’s head.

Ed barely reacts, a shift of his stance as he’s knocked backwards, a grunt as the air gets pushed from his lungs, but other than that he just keeps going, shoving Roy’s head out of range before he claps, sending spikes of stone racing across no man’s land to ruin some bastard’s day. There’s a streak of blood across his temple that looks like it’s dried on, but no visible cut, and even though his face is filthy his hair remains as pristine and golden as ever. He shoots a look at Roy from the corner of his eye, but keeps his hands poised, ready to clap and unleash untold amounts of mayhem on the other side. “You okay, bastard?”

Roy blinks up at him from his spot sprawled on the ground. He doesn’t think it’ll ever really sink in for him that Ed is real.

His silence must go on for too long because Ed puts on a face that’s almost concerned and crouches down so he can squint at Roy better. “What are you even doing out here? Where’s Hughes?”

Maes’ name is enough to grab his attention, especially because now Ed is starting to sound worried, like he’s going to launch himself right out of the relative safety of their ditch and straight into enemy territory if Roy tells him that’s where Maes is. “He’s back at command. They sent me out alone this time.”

“Why the hell would they do that?” He wants to answer, tries to think of a way to tell Ed that the brass are getting nervous about Roy’s influence over the general troops. That his superiors want to keep him and his power on a tight leash, but they can’t afford not to send him out into the fighting, so sometimes they keep Maes from going out as a reminder, as a way of putting Roy under their thumbs. He really does want to, because Ed is a genius and a menace and an inspiration, and he just might have the last piece of the plan that Roy’s trying to scrape together, but that’s when the explosions pick up again and they both duck and cover their heads on instinct.

The flash of a grenade reflects off of a splatter of blood on Ed’s cheek, and Roy’s brain finally kicks back into gear. “Ed, your shoulder.” 

He rolls it self consciously, grimaces a little, but makes no move to show Roy the wound. “It’s a graze. Don’t worry about it.”

Roy snorts, and staggers back to his feet. “I saw you get hit, stop being stubborn and let me help.” He reaches out to grab Ed and ends up with a handful of air where the blond’s hood had been moments before.

“I told you that it’s nothing to worry about.” Ed’s tone is harsher than usual, and his eyes are more panicked than pained, but he’s still clutching his shoulder, and Roy will be damned if Ed bleeds out because he was too stubborn to let Roy pull out the bullet that was meant for his head.

“Too bad. I’m already worried, now come here.” Ed huffs, but he does slink into grabbing range, so Roy counts it as a victory. He’s as gentle as he can be when he pulls the jacket over the shoulder, but Ed still winces when Roy tugs the collar of his shirt down.

There’s a lot less blood than he was expecting.

“I told you it just grazed me.” Now that Roy’s got Ed’s clothes out of the way he can see that Ed was telling the truth. The bullet must have been further off than he thought, even though he could have sworn he saw Ed stagger from the hit, but that’s not what holds his attention.

It’s the scar.

Ed has a thick line of white scar tissue straight down the center of his chest, starting just under the line of his collar and ending somewhere towards the bottom of his ribs, and it’s intersected by something that almost looks like an array. “What-?”

Ed jerks away, shrugging his shoulder to pull his clothes back into place. “Happy now? Or do you want to see the other one while you’re at it?”

Roy blinks. “No. I’m satisfied.”

“Good. Now how about I cash in one of those favors you owe me and you don't ask questions?” Ed’s got that same look on his face, panic well hidden, and Roy _wants_ to ask, wants to know everything, wants to know what it is that dragged someone as brilliant as Ed into this shitshow, but he knows that he can’t, not without Ed closing up and taking off.

“I suppose I can do that.” The tension in Ed’s shoulders finally goes out, and Roy actually gets half a smile in response. 

“You _suppose,_ like I haven’t been the one keeping your ass out of the fire for months.” He slaps his hands together almost casually, and when he sets them to the wall of the trench Roy hears shouts of surprise in the distance as a pit opens underneath some of the gutsier enemy troops that had been trying to crawl their way closer.

Roy reaches out, tugs gently at the end of Ed’s braid and pulls back before he can get swatted at. “Tell you what, you keep saving my ass and one of these days I guess I’ll _have_ to pay you back.”

Ed smiles, all quicksilver and gold, and claps his hands again.

Roy loses his chance to the fifth time Ed saves his life. 

They’re lined up in the trench at intervals, firing shots at the other side whenever they can get them and trying not to get picked off themselves. Ed is in the middle, crouched on a crate and holding a scope, calling targets for Maes’ gun and Roy’s fire both. 

It happens in a series of snapshots.

Roy watches as the soldiers on the other side part for someone, watches as an officer sticks their head up into the crossfire, heedless of the bullets and blazes flying straight for them. 

Watches as their eyes fall on Ed, a beacon of gold in the strobing light, malicious glee spreading across their face. A gun appears over the lip of the trench.

Roy turns, already lunging for Ed, ready to drag him down out of eyeshot, _I told you to cover your hair you dumba-_ He’s too slow. A look of resignation crosses Ed’s too young face.

Three shots fire off, somehow louder than the hundreds of others going off around them. The first slams into Ed’s chest, knocking him clean off his perch and into the dirt, blood spraying through the air and soaking through his coat. 

The other two rip through Maes Hughes, a noble bastard trying to save the kid that’s been hauling their asses out of the fire for months. 

They crumble into each other, Maes slumping over Ed, hands still trying to put pressure on the hole punched through the smaller man. Ed responds like he can’t feel the shot, and even as blood pours from his chest and he sways with its loss he pushes himself to sit up. “Maes, you dumbass! Stay with us, stay with-” Ed starts to slump, and Roy finally gets there just in time to catch the both of them. 

Roy Mustang is 23 years old, kneeling in a trench with the two people he treasures most dying in his arms, and he doesn’t hear the whistle that signals an incoming grenade, but his best friend does.

Maes chokes, clenches a fist in the front of each of their jackets and whispers, “Ed, _please.”_

Ed’s eyes, slipped halfway shut, shoot wide again. 

“Ed _don’t-!_ ” It’s too late. Ed manages to smack two hands together and then lets them fall. The ground surges up, shoving Roy away from them, wrapping him in solid rock, and moments later the boom of a shell exploding sounds off on the other side of his makeshift prison. Roy’s hands are shaking, but he manages to pull a stubby piece of chalk from his pocket, to draw a wobbly circle, to break through the wall that Maes asked for, that Ed transmuted, just to save him. He sobs as it crumbles. 

Half of Ed’s face is gone, his lovely golden hair soaked through with blood and gore. Maes is next to him, eyes wide and glassy, shrapnel embedded in his chest and the ground where Roy was just kneeling.

Roy turns his eyes to the enemy trench in the distance, raises his hand-

And snaps.

The first time Roy dies it’s his fault entirely. 

Maes’ and Ed’s blood is still wet on his clothes when he starts his campaign, unleashing fire in swathes across no man’s land, pushing it as far into enemy territory as he can reach.

His superiors start to talk, start to send him out to the places where the fighting is the worst for their side, but Roy couldn’t care less. He has his own mission now.

It's nearly a month before he finally tracks down the hideous spray of green hair that dashed his world to ruins.

 _“You!_ ” The voice that tears out of his throat is raw and unfamiliar but Roy barely notices. The officer doesn’t even have the chance to blink before Roy’s clicking his fingers, flooding the entire trench in front of him with flame. It rages on for nearly ten seconds before it dies down, but as soon as it does Roy gets to watch in horror as red lightning starts to stitch together the ashes left behind.

He snaps again and howls with anger when the smiling face reforms in front of him a second time. 

“Interesting.” A voice says behind him, and Roy doesn’t have the chance to turn around before everything goes black.

When he wakes back up he’s kneeling, arms tied behind his back, in front of a woman in a long black dress that looks far too clean to belong anywhere near this war.

“Mustang, I assume?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, standing smoothly from the chair she’s perched in and approaching him, grasping his chin between her thumb and first finger and forcing him to look up at her. “You’ve been causing an awful lot of trouble for my boys. I wonder why that is, hmm?”

Roy tries to pull his chin away but her grip is firm, so he sets his shoulders, grits his teeth and doesn’t say anything.

She yanks her hand away, starts to walk a slow circle around him. “Answer me Alchemist.” Her voice is a rumbling purr, but something about the way she forms her words reaches deep into the instinct driven parts of Roy’s brain and _tugs,_ telling him that this is a predator. “You could’ve pulled out these tricks the minute you got here, but you were holding out on us. What changed?” 

“I think it has something to do with me blowing his shiny little toy to smithereens in front of him.” The voice is unfamiliar, but Roy still knows exactly who he’ll see when he turns around. Sure enough, it’s the slimy green haired git from the trenches, propped casually in the doorframe. Inside his head Roy fumes. He’s so close, closer than he’s even been, in the same room with Maes’ and Ed’s killer, and he doesn’t have his gloves. His hands are, quite literally, tied, and he can’t follow through with his feeble attempt at redemption.

The officer shoves off the door frame with a shoulder and struts into the room, crouching in front of Roy and putting on a condescending smile. “Is that it? I blew Pretty Boy and Glasses to Hell and you didn’t like it?”

“Envy-”

“Oh _please_ Lust, what’s he gonna-” Roy jolts forward and clamps his teeth around the officer’s- _Envy’s?-_ throat and digs in till he tastes blood. “AUGH!” He gets shoved off and slapped for his trouble, but he also gets to grin up at the bastard with blood covered teeth and laugh, because he bets they never saw that coming.

The indignant look on Envy’s face as his throat reforms around the hole Roy just bit in it isn’t as satisfying as turning him to ash was, but it’s still pretty great. It also has the bonus of distracting them from what he’s doing to get his hands loose.

“He's a military dog Envy, I shouldn’t have to tell you that he bites.” Envy huffs and flounces towards the door, eyeing Roy with disdain and giving him a wide berth, especially after Roy spits a mouthful of blood in his direction. 

“Whatever.” They jerk their head in his direction. He holds very still so they don’t see that he’s slipped one of Maes’ knives out of his sleeves and started sawing at the ropes. “You got your answer, can we just kill him already?”

Lust laughs, a short cruel cackle. “Why waste bait?” She sways back towards him, pinches his cheek roughly and shakes his face. “The Fullmetals put too much effort into keeping this one alive to let it all go to waste.”

“What makes you think they'll show up now though? They probably think he’s dead already.” Lust’s eye roll more than speaks for her opinion of Envy, and if Roy wasn’t mad enough to spit fire he’d probably find this pretty funny.

“He knows you’re here doesn’t he? I’m sure he has a few choice words for us.” Envy _also_ rolls their eyes, so it doesn’t look like _anyone_ in this room actually wants to be here. 

That’s when Roy feels the last of the rope slip free, so he clears his throat and speaks up. He’s never denied himself the opportunity to take advantage of a dramatic moment before, and he’s certainly not going to start now. “Well, _I_ certainly have a few things to say.”

“Hmm?” Lust’s face is unworried and casual when she turns, until the moment she notices that his hands are loose at his sides. “How-”

Free of his bonds, Roy staggers to his feet and slaps both of his hands to his chest, activating the array he painstakingly scratched into his skin on sleepless nights between bouts of fire and bullets. It starts to glow, a searing red that burns through his shirt and washes the walls like a mockery of the warning lights that line the trenches. Envy’s eyes go wide and they bolt for the door, expletives pouring from their mouth the entire time. It slams behind them seconds before Lust can follow, trapping her in with Roy, and she’s not the one he wanted but she’ll have to do. She shrieks like a demon and turns to lunge at him, a long knife clutched in her hand and headed straight for his throat. 

“This is for Maes Hughes, you _bitch."_

The transmutation finishes, and the inferno engulfs the space around him with the tip of the blade less than an inch from his skin. The fire sears his face, too bright to look at, too hot to stand, rolling forward and flooding the room with enough force to blow out the walls.

Roy Mustang tips his head back and soaks it in, letting the darkness carry him off.

_(There’s an endless white space and a massive black door and the outline of someone with a too wide smile, with too many teeth. “Did you really think it would be that easy? You’re not finished yet, Alchemist.”_

_And then the doors are opening, dragging him in, and Roy doesn’t want to remember anything else.)_

Roy wakes up. 

He’s laying on a bed in some kind of med bay, the beeping of random machines filling the air with white noise. Something shifts in the corner of his vision, and when he tips his face to the side to see it better he nearly jumps out of his skin.

There’s someone sitting next to the bed, planted solidly between Roy and the door, and when his eyes finally focus he feels his heart clench in his chest. Their hair is a pale gold, close to the shade he remembers but not quite dark enough, and too short besides. The owner of the hair turns to look at him and Roy would do a double take if he wasn’t frozen in place.

The man next to the bed appears to be made entirely of metal, up to and including the gold colored wire serving as his hair.

“What-?” Roy tries to push himself up, but a solid hand on his shoulder pushes him gently back, carefully avoiding the bandages wrapped around his chest.

“Try not to move too much, you’re still healing.” Healing from what? He knows exactly what the array he carved into himself was supposed to do, and he should be a smear of ash on a floor somewhere right now. “I’m Al. Do you remember your name?”

He blinks. “Roy.” A smile stretches across the metal face, and it’s impossibly warm.

“That’s great! We were a little worried.” He taps at a few of the screens and then leans out the door, shouting down the hallway outside. “Brother, your soldier is awake!” Al’s voice is different than Roy was expecting, not nearly as deep as he would have thought. 

“He’s not my soldier!” The voice that echoes back is familiar and impossible, and Roy slams his eyes shut and tries not to cry. 

There’s some clanging and a huff, and then something taps him on the shoulder. 

Roy opens his eyes and there he is, standing in the doorway wrapped in red like Roy didn’t see most of his body lying lifeless in a trench a few weeks ago. Like Roy didn’t try to incinerate himself and half the moon to avenge him.

“Roy.” Ed's voice is barely a whisper, and then he throws himself across the room and wraps Roy in his arms. The hug lasts barely a second before Ed is smacking him in the back of the head. “You _bastard!_ I put all that effort into saving your ass and you go and blow it up the first chance you get?” 

“Brother, he did-”

 _“I don’t care_ that he managed to take Lust out with him, it was a stupid move.” The two are glaring at each other like this is a fight that could carry on, so Roy decides to cut in.

“You’re dead.” Ed and Al both freeze, and part of Roy suspects that they almost forgot he was there. “I saw your body.” 

Ed sighs, turning and slumping into the chair next to the bed. Al slips out quietly, but Roy hardly notices, too busy taking in the details of the man in front of him. “You did.”

“But you’re right here.” Roy sticks a hand out and pokes Ed in the arm, just to be sure. Ed swats his hand away.

“Yup.” Ed leans forward, setting his elbows to his knees and letting his head hang. His braid swings forward, gold as ever, clean and shining and free of the blood that had soaked it through the day that-

“How.” Roy doesn’t even notice how tense he is until Ed reaches out, takes his hand and coaxes him to loosen the fist he’d curled it into.

Then he leans back and pulls down the collar of his shirt, stretches it until Roy can see the top of the scar he nearly asked about, a few months and forever ago. The array that had inspired the placement of Roy’s plan B. “The short version is that I have an automail heart and I can’t die.”

Roy snorts. “That’s not-” He’s cut off rather abruptly when Ed pulls a knife out of nowhere, shoves his sleeve up, and drags it straight across his arm. “Ed!” Blood gushes from the cut, but only for a few seconds before Roy watches in amazement as it seals itself right in front of him. He reaches out, fingers hovering over unblemished but bloody skin. He withdraws his hand without making contact. “Okay. What’s the long version?”

“My father performed a highly taboo alchemical surgery on me and my brother in an attempt to save our lives and now we’re immortal. This-” He taps at his chest where his shirt hides the scar. “is a souvenir from when he found us. He couldn’t save my heart, so he replaced it instead.”

Roy thinks about Ed rolling into a foxhole minutes after a microwave attack, thinks about a shot to the shoulder and a bullet to the chest and Ed’s corpse lying in the mud surrounded by shrapnel. Roy stops thinking. “And… Al?” 

Ed’s face goes tight. “Al…” He rubs at his eyes. “Al’s the opposite. His heart is the _only_ bit of him that Hoenheim managed to save. So he just… replaced everything else, stuck it in there, and I sealed it off with a little bit of blood alchemy.”

Roy shakes his head. “That’s impossible.” 

The laugh that spills out of Ed’s mouth is harsh and ugly, and Roy doesn’t like it at all. He shakes his head. “Not even remotely. He’s not even the most unlikely thing on this _ship.”_

Roy lets his lips quirk up, tries to force a real smile but can’t quite get there. “Then what is?”

“At the moment?” Ed smirks, kicks a foot out at the side of the bed. “You.” 

That's when it comes back to Roy just what he did, that he should be dead and gone, burned to ash so thoroughly it’d be like he’d never existed in the first place. His hand goes to his chest, hovering over the spot that would’ve been the middle of the circle, the center of an array so devastating he’d triple checked that his notes were destroyed, that after he blew himself and the only copy of his work to kingdom come no one else would be able to use it, because power hungry, desperate, warmongering soldiers shouldn’t have access to that kind of destruction. For any reason.

But he’s still here, which means it didn’t work. He thinks back to the first time they met, the way Ed had taken a single look at an array Roy had spent years mastering and made it better with hardly a thought. “What did I do wrong?”

A head shake that sends his braid swaying again. “Nothing. Your work was perfect.”

“But my array should’ve-” 

“Vaporized half of the moon and knocked you ass over elbows into empty space? It did. _And_ you managed to take Lust down with you.” Something about the way Ed says the name of the woman who’s captured him piques Roy’s interest, but he doesn’t let it distract him from the important part of that sentence.

“Then how am I alive?” Ed’s face goes blank and he falters for a moment before reaching for something under the bed. He comes back up with-

A hand mirror? Roy takes it, turns it to look and-

His eyes are gleaming metal, illuminated from within so light shines through where his pupils would be. There are thin tendrils of metal that branch out slightly from them like silver veins, and the skin directly around them is pale, so pale he could swear he can see straight through it to the metal underneath. He blinks, and now that he knows to listen for it, Roy can hear the gentle whir of automail. He looks at Ed, who’s watching him with a carefully neutral expression.

“Congratulations Roy, you’re immortal. Welcome to the crew of the Amestris.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed!! I have a few other ideas for this verse, and comments and kudos encourage me to do something with them!!!  
> Please tell me what you thought!!


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